SXSW Film Review: 'Open Windows'

March 20, 2014|Justin Chang | Variety

A fiendishly inventive thriller built around an audacious if unsustainable gimmick, "Open Windows" elevates Hitchcockian suspense to jittery new levels of mayhem and paranoia. Essentially conceived as a technologically sophisticated mash-up of "Rear Window" and "Rope," this latest mind-bender from Spanish genre trickster Nacho Vigalondo ("Timecrimes," "Extraterrestrial") unfolds entirely in one carefully manipulated "shot," with the camera glued to the lead character's computer screen, employing desktop videos, images and pop-ups to tell its lurid tale of celebrity obsession, stalking, hacking, surveillance, blackmail and murder. Barely maintaining coherence if not plausibility, the compulsively watchable result should enjoy a vigorous fest and VOD life; fitting as it might be to stream it on your laptop, its complex visual layers and blink-and-you-miss-'em plot turns are best suited to the bigscreen.

One of former adult star Sasha Grey's higher-profile vehicles since her mainstream debut in Steven Soderbergh's "The Girlfriend Experience," "Open Windows" also plays like a companion piece of sorts to Eugenio Mira's "Grand Piano," another recent thriller in which a justifiably freaked-out Elijah Wood found himself at the mercy of a menacingly disembodied voice. If that film suggested an ivory-tickling riff on Brian De Palma, then Vigalondo's picture feels like a high-tech Hitch homage on speed, one that exerts a strong narrative grip for about an hour before tumbling down a discomfiting series of rabbit holes that strain credulity and internal logic to the breaking point.

The opening minutes play like scenes from a fairly routine-looking action-thriller, but these turn out to be clips from a new movie starring Jill Goddard (Grey), a red-hot young actress whose sordid off-camera activities have made her major tabloid fodder. We're watching this footage through the eyes of Nick Chambers (Wood), who's working on his laptop in a hotel room overlooking downtown Austin; he's come to town to have dinner with Jill, his celebrity crush -- a prize he won in an online contest. It's typical of the film's formal resourcefulness that this setup is conveyed without conventional exposition, and without the camera ever once cutting or moving away from the computer screen: Aiming a webcam at himself, nervous young Nick records a short video bio, introducing himself to the contest operators and to the audience whose company he will be sharing for the next 100 or so minutes.

As it turns out, the contest is merely the pretext for an altogether more diabolical purpose, and before long Nick is receiving strange instructions from a voice on his computer whose owner identifies himself as Chord (the voice belongs to British actor Neil Maskell, sounding like a menacing Michael Caine). An all-knowing, all-seeing presence with advanced degrees in hacking and surveillance, Chord proceeds to open various windows on Nick's desktop, teasingly granting him access to the contents of Jill's phone, and even offering him a direct line of sight into the hotel room where the actress is planning to meet a lover. That this room is located in the same hotel where Nick is staying is hardly a coincidence, and it's not long before Chord is able to coerce the young man into being not just a passive observer, but an active, even violent participant in the proceedings.

Nick, who runs a Jill Goddard fansite, may be a slightly pathetic, pants-creaming sort, but he's not a bad guy, and he's noticeably uncomfortable with this criminal invasion of Jill's privacy, as well as his own. What Hitchcock left as elegantly unnerving subtext in "Rear Window" (admit it, you like to watch), Vigalondo serves up with a malevolent grin and the latest in state-of-the-art spy craft, as Chord openly, tauntingly encourages Nick and the viewer to indulge their private fantasies -- to take out their sexual frustrations on a widely coveted lust object who, multimillionaire and prima donna that she is, clearly deserves all the humiliation she gets. (As written and performed, Jill can't help but evoke any number of talents who have found themselves in an unflattering celebrity spotlight, from Kristen Stewart to Miley Cyrus.) This all comes to the fore in the film's most ethically complicated (and questionable) scene, in which Nick is forced to order Jill to perform an online striptease for his private benefit, lest she come to grievous bodily harm at Chord's hands.